Keim, Christopher

ORAL HISTORY OF CHRISTOPHER KEIM
Interviewed by Jim Overholt
July 27, 1990
[Side A]
Interviewer: – 7th, 1990, and I will be talking with Chris Keim about early Oak Ridge.
[break in recording]
Dr. Christopher Keim: – before that phenomenon of the Uranium atom splitting, and he said, “Well, in the biological sciences, we have term ‘fission,’ which we use.” And he said, “I think ‘fission’ would be an ideal term,” and that’s what they used.
Interviewer: So this was Bill Arnold who gave – was he British?
Dr. Christopher Keim: Then he came to Oak Ridge during the war years, 1944, ’45, and he worked here and I think he stayed here. I’ve lost track of him because the other day I was thinking of him and I was getting him and his wife confused with another Arnold, Elizabeth Arnold and St. George Tucker Arnold. St. George Tucker Arnold has since died and his wife is still living here. The Bill Arnolds, I’ve lost track of them. I intended to try to trace them down. A city directory might tell us.
Interviewer: Yeah, that would be a good source for me, too.
Dr. Christopher Keim: There is in the Oak Ridge telephone directory, I think, a William A. Arnold, and I didn’t know whether it would be quite the thing to do to call –
Interviewer: And say, “Are you the same?”
Dr. Christopher Keim: “Are you the Bill Arnold that I’ve lost track of?” because as we all get up in advanced years, one by one, they die.
Interviewer: That’s right.
Dr. Christopher Keim: That’s right. Could be embarrassed.
Interviewer: Well, I wouldn’t mind doing it. I might do it myself. Let me see –
[break in recording]
Interviewer: – that one thing that I’m interested in right now and, let’s see, let me date your arrival here. You came here in what, exactly what date?
Dr. Christopher Keim: I came on an interview December 26, 1943. Then I came back and entered the employment of Tennessee Eastman Corporation about February 5, 1944, somewhere around there.
Interviewer: Okay. Then you came at a very crucial moment, according to my notes, because this was right at the moment when they finally started trying to get these calutrons to work, and they didn’t work. Everything was breaking down on them. Can you tell me a little bit about – I want to know the atmosphere of that moment. Really, that went from November all the way down into the summer when it was a pretty bad time for Y-12 people.
Dr. Christopher Keim: Yes, although they did get the production, first production building in operation in about January of 1944, but they did have a real critical time prior to that because the magnetic fields, which were so important or vital, were breaking down. Magnetic fields were created by windings of silver.
Interviewer: Coils of silver.
Dr. Christopher Keim: Big coils, about ten feet in diameter, although it was in a rectangle. Those magnetic fields were breaking down, and there were several reasons. Because of the heavy currents, which were being passed though those silver windings, a lot of heat was generated, so the coils were cooled by oil. Oil was being circulated through and taken out of the cooling towers and cooled and back in again. Well, there were several reasons the current began to break down. One, there was water in the oil, and that’s a conductor of electricity, and that would short across the windings. There were lots of impurities in the piping systems. Those impurities were there because of construction. The workmen didn’t know or didn’t appreciate how clean things had to be, and maybe the inspectors weren’t completely sure of their inspection. And then there was another reason: the first windings, between two windings, there would be an insulator of Masonite. Masonite absorbed the moisture. As it absorbed the moisture, the electrical current went through the Masonite, shorted out. That increased and increased until those Masonite separators became carbon, and carbon was a good conductor of electricity. I was in the pilot plant for most of the time, and our coils in the pilot plant gradually began to short out because of those Masonite windings becoming carbonized due to the moisture and the current flowing through. As time went on, and it didn’t take long, of course, we installed in the circulating system of the oil a certain bit of equipment that would remove the moisture, and, of course, we filtered out all the impurities. But even then, we did have to take a lot of coils – they had to go back to Allis-Chalmers in Milwaukee and be rewound.
Interviewer: They were too tight, weren’t they. These coils were.
Dr. Christopher Keim: Well, and largely because of this Masonite and the shorting out.
Interviewer: So it wasn’t so much the tightness, it’s the –
Dr. Christopher Keim: It was not so much the tightness. Now there may have been more in the design that was faulty, I’m not sure. So, the first production buildings just collapsed completely because the magnetic fields could not be sustained. So it took a major overhaul.
Interviewer: Okay, so this was going on when you came here on the site. Can you remember when this began to be straightened out? How long did that take?
Dr. Christopher Keim: No, I really couldn’t because the electromagnetic enrichment was in two stages: the Alpha stage, which took the Uranium-235 from .7% up to about 25%; then the Beta stage, which took it from 25% up to 95%. The Alpha Building, of course, was the first one started, and that was operating in February when I came. But my work in the Pilot Plant, along with many others, was principally to try to improve the equipment. The equipment that went into the first building had a certain design. Hopefully it was improved so that as the second building went into operation, better equipment with more productivity was obtained. I remember when the Beta Building, first Beta Building went into production. This was sometime in the summer of 1944, maybe the spring. We closed down the Pilot Plant, and we all went to the Beta Building to help get it started. We quickly decided we needed to do some experimentation, which you can’t do on a production line, you shouldn’t do. So we went back and opened up the Pilot Plant again. So from 1944, February of 1944 to the time I left Y-12 in June of ’57, except for about two weeks, all my time was in the Pilot Plant in Process Improvement, although after the Uranium needs were passed and, of course, K-25, the gaseous diffusion process by the summer of 1945 was able to replace the electromagnetic process completely. Then in the Pilot Plant, we, on our own initiative, experimented with separating isotopes of other elements besides Uranium, and that started a twelve year program that I stayed with until we had gone through all the elements which have naturally occurring isotopes, and we had enriched them. You can imagine what a thrill that was to all of us, because it was the first time it had ever been done. Isotopes were known; they had been identified in mass spectrographs, but they were too small to collect measurable quantities. Now, the calutrons were really enlargements of those laboratory mass spectrograms.
Interviewer: Have you heard the story about Groves going before the Tennessee Eastman board of directors and trying to convince them to please take this job and help us to separate the ‘isotropes’? He kept mispronouncing it and he got out of the room, he was so determined to get this company to come in and do this, and that turned out to be quite an undertaking, which is not written about very much, you know, the people like DuPont, to get them to –
Dr. Christopher Keim: Yes, Tennessee Eastman wanted out as soon as the war was over.
Interviewer: Yeah, right.
Dr. Christopher Keim: And they did.
Interviewer: But he left the boardroom that day, and he turned to J. S. Marshall, and he said, “Well, how did I do?” He says, “How could you keep mispronouncing that word over and over again.” He said there was some member of that board who had a Ph.D. in Physics, I think he said, and he said, “I saw him shudder every time you mispronounced the word.”
Dr. Christopher Keim: Oh, he would, he would, and you’d feel sorry for him, the General, because he was trying to convince them to do the job then, but he didn’t quite know what he was doing.
Interviewer: Exactly. He didn’t know what he was saying. Let’s go back to that period again. Now, you’ve described very well the technical problems they had. What about the human atmosphere? Can you remember what people – was this the most tense period you remember?
Dr. Christopher Keim: Oh, my, yes, because – now, there were different kinds of people. There were people who didn’t know what was going on, and many of them were just waiting to be put to work, because they were in training sessions, but they had to have them all ready to go when the production buildings were ready to go. Those people were probably thankful to have a nice paying job and they probably were not particularly on edge. The technical people, people who knew what we were trying to do at that time, it was a very tense period. I had concluded the first day of my interview what they were doing here. They told me enough to let me draw my own conclusions, but I decided in my own mind what they were doing. But, of course, none of us knew, first of all, if atomic energy could ever be used as a bomb, although we did know, both because of the nuclear reactor at Stagg Field in Chicago, which went critical in –
Interviewer: I think it was November or December of ’42.
Dr. Christopher Keim: ’42, and then the Graphite Reactor went critical in November of ’43, so we knew a self-sustained reaction could be sustained. Now, could that be made into an explosive device? Nobody knew for sure, but we thought it could be. We also thought that, and had good reason at the time to believe that the Germans were working on something like this. Later, after the war, when I visited Germany, particularly Professor Mattaugh at, can’t think right now, the university where he is, he was doing the same kind of work over there with mass spectrographs that we were doing here, and I asked him if they were working on separating enough Uranium-235 to make a bomb, and he said, “No.” He said, “Some of us had convinced the military that we should separate the isotope from Iron, and make a lightweight battleship using a light isotope of Iron,” which was all fiction, of course. But he said – so they let Professor Mattaugh and his people continue working on the separation of isotopes like Iron, which was just fine with them, because that was the research in which they were engaged. And then, of course, you’ve heard of the Alsos Commission, haven’t you?
Interviewer: No, I haven’t.
Dr. Christopher Keim: The Alsos Commission, and I’m not sure it’s an acronym for something [Editor’s note: Alsos is not an acronym], when the Allied armies moved forward into Germany, this civilian team of high level scientists and engineers went with them.
Interviewer: Oh, I’m sorry, I do know about this.
Dr. Christopher Keim: And immediately would go into the universities under military protection, they would capture the professors, and they would take over the laboratories.
Interviewer: Right. They were going to poison them. There was a plan, they had even discussed trying to poison them, bizarre schemes.
Dr. Christopher Keim: Jimmy Lane, who lived in Oak Ridge for some time, has since died unfortunately, Jimmy was a member of that team.
Interviewer: Is that right?
Dr. Christopher Keim: And he didn’t say much about it, but informally, we used to visit with him a little about it.
Interviewer: There’s also a story, too, that on D-Day, people went in there with Geiger counters to see if they could detect any radiation, and they did fly reconnaissance planes to see if they could detect radiation in the air over Germany to see if there was a reactor or something.
Dr. Christopher Keim: That would be good. One morning in November, no wait, in 1945, it was in the spring of the year, I was shift supervisor in the Pilot Plant, and I received a telephone call. I may have told you this, that ‘Professor Baker’ would be visiting us?
Interviewer: Yeah, I think you mentioned that, but go ahead and tell the story.
Dr. Christopher Keim: I said, “Who’s Professor Baker?” And the person called me, said, “I can’t tell you that, but you may recognize him.” I said, “Okay.” Well, sure enough, when General Groves, E. O. Lawrence, and the party walked through the door, it was Niels, Professor Niels Bohr, just like he was walking right out of a textbook, where I’d seen him over and over again. And he was most friendly. He was just delightful, visited with us and asked about our work, and one thing or another. Then, in 1955, ten years later, I had the opportunity to visit with Professor Niels Bohr in his laboratory in Copenhagen, and I reminded him of his visit with us in Oak Ridge, and sure, he remembered it. So we visited about that. Then I asked him a very personal question. I told him I had heard that when the English two-seater fighter plane snatched him away from Denmark before the Germans could get him, that they put him in the back seat of that fighter plane, gave him an oxygen helmet, and he didn’t try it on, and the fighter plane in going back to England had to go so high to get away from the flack, they were trying to shoot them down, and the pilot told Professor Bohr to put on his oxygen helmet, and it was too small, because Professor Bohr had a larger head than they had expected. He couldn’t put that oxygen helmet on, and when they landed in England, he was unconscious.
Interviewer: So they had to revive him.
Dr. Christopher Keim: They had to revive him, and fortunately they did.
Interviewer: I’ll be darned. Do you remember what year that was when this was done? I guess that must have been ’41 or so before we were in the –
Dr. Christopher Keim: Well, that was before we were probably into it. Yes, it was ’41 or ’42, along there. I’d have to go back and try to find that in our information.
Interviewer: Where did he end up residing in America?
Dr. Christopher Keim: I do not know. Probably at Princeton. That’s where Wigner and Fermi, that was the gathering place. University of Chicago was also the gathering place. Those two places in particular, but I would guess at Princeton, but I don’t know for sure.
Interviewer: Okay, you mention Lawrence. How many times did you see Lawrence while you were here during the war?
Dr. Christopher Keim: Oh, my, we saw him at least once a month.
Interviewer: Was this a formal meeting, or did you see him coming through, passing through?
Dr. Christopher Keim: Let me tell you one particular example. He came into the pilot plant one night, and sat down at the controls and began operating the electrical controls and he said to us, “You ought to be getting more production than you’re getting. Let me see what I can do.” And he turned up the accelerating voltage, he turned up the temperature of the charge bottle where the Uranium Tetrachloride was being evaporated. Things began to spark inside the tank, the vacuum tank, but he got greater and greater and greater production. And he turned to us and he said, “See, this is the way you’ve got to do it.”
Unknown interrupter: Where’s your typewriter?
Interviewer: Right here.
Unknown interrupter: Is that the only one we have?
Interviewer: I don’t know if there’s another one around or not. You want me to take this out? I can take it in there and put it in there.
Unknown interrupter: Would you do that for me, please?
Interviewer: Yeah, okay.
[break in recording]
Interviewer: So –
Dr. Christopher Keim: As soon as he left the building, it wasn’t more than five minutes, less than that, the whole run terminated itself. It just literally exploded inside the tank, and of course that was what we were supposed to do, push and push and push until something failed and then open the tank and look in and take equipment out, find out what had failed, and improve it. Usually there were electrical insulators, because we were using more than twenty thousand Volts for accelerating the ions in there and they all had to be insulated from the metal tank itself. So we learned our lesson. Not only did we learn that he knew what he was doing, he could operate those tanks himself, but he gave us a new criterion to follow in our own development here.
Interviewer: Okay, tell me a little bit about his personality. How did he come over to people? I’ve always read that he was so enthusiastic and so confident in everything, that he just instilled this sort of confidence in everyone else.
Dr. Christopher Keim: Exactly. He was so enthusiastic and just moved at full speed all the time, communicated well, was very informal. He would hold seminars with us. Let me give you an example of one in particular. On July 17th, 1945, they exploded the first plutonium bomb at Alamogordo. The very next day, E. O. Lawrence was in our Pilot Plant, and that was kind of a center of process development. Some of the people there were some of his own people from University of California, some of them were Tennessee Eastman people like myself, and he called us all together. He didn’t tell us about what had happened the day before. He told us what he was going to be doing and what they were going to be doing at the University of California after the war. He knew the war was as good as over when he saw that bomb.
Interviewer: He was already talking in post-war terms by that time.
Dr. Christopher Keim: Because he knew if that bomb had to be used, it would end the war. And the confidence which he demonstrated was so contagious at that time.
Interviewer: Was he a big man? He looks like he was big in the photographs.
Dr. Christopher Keim: Yes, he was not unusually large, I don’t know, six feet or maybe a little more, but he carried a bit of weight, not overweight. It was just so natural with him. He was not thin, he was not overweight.
Interviewer: And he was what, fifty? Somewhere around late forties early fifties?
Dr. Christopher Keim: At that time he was probably, yes, late forties or about fifty. I’ve forgotten his age when he died. Do you know?
Interviewer: Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t even know when he died.
Dr. Christopher Keim: I have that in my chronology at home. I should have brought it along. But after the war, especially, I well remember we used to hear that he was ill with diverculo –
Interviewer: Diverculosis, yeah, no, diverticulosis. [Editor’s note: diverticulitis]
Dr. Christopher Keim: Something like that. I think that.
Interviewer: Yeah, my grandmother had that.
Dr. Christopher Keim: He never survived that, he just became worse and worse. Both he and Fermi died too soon. It’s unfortunate that they didn’t have at least twenty more years on their active work.
Interviewer: It’s amazing the youth of all of those, even those great upper echelon scientists, they were still quite young.
Dr. Christopher Keim: When I came, I was not yet thirty-eight. General Groves was only thirty-six.
Interviewer: No, forty-six.
Dr. Christopher Keim: Okay, all right, I’m wrong.
Interviewer: But that’s still young, though.
Dr. Christopher Keim: But Colonel Nichols was thirty-six. I was one of the older people out at Y-12 and certainly in the Pilot Plant.
Interviewer: I’ve heard Waldo Cohn say several times, he said, “I was thirty-three when I got here and I was an old man compared to the rest of them.
Dr. Christopher Keim: I see people retiring right now, I noticed the other day, George Banic is retiring. Now I expect George has worked up until seventy. I hired George in right after he graduated from Penn State. And he worked for me all that time, or all the time I was in Y-12. A great, great guy. George would be worth visiting with because he has such a rich background.
Interviewer: How do you spell his last name?
Dr. Christopher Keim: B-A-N-I-C. I believe it’s C. Now there are two George Banics in the telephone directory, and I think it’s B-A-N-I-C. They used to live in the Garden Apartments. I don’t know whether they still do or not.
Interviewer: Before I leave the subject of Lawrence, he practically lived here for about a year, I guess, didn’t he? He just stayed in Oak Ridge, or, do you know?
Dr. Christopher Keim: Well, he’d be traveling some. It didn’t seem to me that he was here all the time. He’d come and go, but I’m sure during those critical days of starting up the production buildings, he lived here. I don’t know for sure. You see, I wasn’t close to production. I was close to the process improvement, which was on the fringe.
Interviewer: Now, one other thing that I really want to try to pinpoint, if I can, when you were working in there, did you pretty much know every part of the process of the electromagnetic? I mean, you knew the names of these things, not the code names, but the real names and the people you worked with.
Dr. Christopher Keim: Yes, you’ve known of the different Roman numerals on the badges. Top management – and all I know is Y-12. I knew there was something going on over the hill at the X-10 area, something down at the K-25 area, but I never visited there. I was pretty well sequestered in the Y-12 area. But I knew our very top managers had Roman numeral V on their badges, and people like me, next level, had IV. We were told, “We will tell you what you need to know. You don’t need to ask any questions. In fact, we encourage you not to ask questions.” But as it was, we knew at my level the process in all its detail. We didn’t know the production quantities, the production figures. Those working in chemistry would know all the chemistry details, but I didn’t have to know the chemistry details, because I was interested in the mechanical and electrical, the physics details of the source, the ion source, and the collector. And we had a lot of problems with both. We tried to increase the production, the number of ions, atoms, coming out of the source, and we’d try to improve the retention up there in the collector, because we knew as they came in there, a lot of them would hit and bounce right out again. We had to trap them in there.
Interviewer: It had something to do with the texture at first. It was just going into the – I forget what metal it was, but it was just staying in there; they couldn’t get it out.
Dr. Christopher Keim: We used principally both copper and graphite, but I think mostly we used graphite, because graphite could operate at an extremely high temperature.
[telephone rings]
[break in recording]
Dr. Christopher Keim: But one night we were working on the receiver, the collector, and we had a graphite grid placed in front of the collector pockets, trying to slow down those Uranium-235 atoms as they would go in, try to slow them down, so when they hit on the inside, into the pockets, they wouldn’t bounce back. We had some success with that. However, the energy of those ions hitting that grid would cause it to run red hot, and we hadn’t been able to extend its life. We wanted the time of life for a normal production run to be, oh, four or five days if possible, and anything less than seventy-two hours or ninety-six hours we tried to improve. We were working on that equipment one night and getting some results on it. General Groves came in and he said, “How’s your new collector working?” I was shift supervisor and I said, “Well, it works fine for about twenty-four hours, but we haven’t been able to extend its life greater than that. And we have hopes; we’re going to keep working on it.” He said, “I’d like to see your log book.” He sat down and he looked at the log book. He visited with different people. Then he asked us a key question; that’s really why he was there that night. He said, “Tomorrow morning at eight o’clock, we have to determine what equipment would go into our next Beta building. Is this collector ready?”
We said, “No, it’s not.” He said, “If you had to make the decision tomorrow morning, what would your decision [be]?” Well, I’m very conservative myself, and I said, “I’d stick with that that we know will work and try to improve the productivity of what already is working.” The next morning, I got a telephone call from somebody in Tennessee Eastman production, and they said, “General Groves reviewed his visit with you fellows last night. He’s told us that in the next Beta building to use the same equipment that we’d been using.” But how he knew so much, how he could get to the detail of so much of what was going on is –
Interviewer: Yeah, he was really quite remarkable.
Dr. Christopher Keim: He was.
Interviewer: I mean, he was everywhere, you know, he sure was an abrupt individual, made a lot of people angry, but what you really wanted in this was speed, and if there was anybody that could do that it was Groves.
Dr. Christopher Keim: He was positive and he was precise. When he would come in to visit with us, he always had an aide with him, of course. His aide would be looking at his watch, and when the time came, he’d touch the general on the arm, “Have to go.” And I admired that in him because he was on a minute by minute schedule.
Interviewer: He was so busy, I read the other night, he was so busy that he had a secretary, Jean O’Leary, I believe was her name, that when he left Washington, I bet you’ve heard this story, that he would take her with him. He wanted to dictate notes to her, but he didn’t have time to stay in Washington and do it, so he’d take her with him, dictate notes on the train, and they would get to a certain point, she would get off the train and get on another one and go back to Washington.
Dr. Christopher Keim: I’m not surprised, and I can imagine that he’d probably go to Chicago and then go back. A couple of our trips to California –
Interviewer: Yeah, I wanted to ask you that. Tell me a little about those trips.
Dr. Christopher Keim: Probably the first trip I took was plane, a DC-3, unpressurized, and we landed at Memphis, we landed at Little Rock, we landed at Dallas, we landed at Albuquerque, and every time we came down, I would feel in my ears that they were hemorrhaging. I was scared, and it took me two or three days after I got to Berkeley to recover from that, but when I got on that plane, I did not know I had a cold. But that change in altitude caught me in a hurry. After that, many of us preferred to take the Streamliners. We’d get on a train, either at Knoxville, or, if we called Knoxville in the morning and said, the afternoon train, whatever number, we want to get on at Edgemoor Road, they would stop. And we’d jump on the first place we could get on, and we might have to carry our baggage all the way through the train to get to our Pullman seats, but they would stop for us. We would then take the Streamliner, either the Zephyr from Burlington or the Union Pacific out of Chicago, and generally we’d be put in the last compartment on the train. And I thought that was strange, except the service we got convinced me that that compartment probably was reserved for the Manhattan Project.
Interviewer: For purposes of maintaining –
Dr. Christopher Keim: Continually.
Interviewer: Yeah, and maybe that was also purposes of security.
Dr. Christopher Keim: And for purpose of security, and the first thing the Pullman conductor asked me when he put us into that room, “Do you want your meals brought to you? Or do you want to go to the dining room, the dining car?” And one trip we had our meals brought to us; we did not want to go to the dining car. The last trip I think I took at that time was probably sometime in ’45, because the United Nations’ first organization meeting was being held in San Francisco, and we were in that compartment at the rear. But I enjoyed going up to the club car, because it was filled with well-known radio commentators and columnists.
Interviewer: Can you remember some of their names now?
Dr. Christopher Keim: Walter Winchell.
Interviewer: Is that right?
Dr. Christopher Keim: And the newspaper journalists didn’t care for Walter Winchell. They planted a rumor and saw that he got it, because they knew he’d get to San Francisco about three or four o’clock, Sunday afternoon. He would go right on the air at six o’clock with his Sunday evening broadcast and he would just delight in scoop. Well they gave him a false scoop. And he went on out on the air that night and told that as if it were the gospel truth, and they, in their columns the very next day, were able to tell what the truth was and really, they didn’t tell that they had planted this, but it was obvious.
Interviewer: So just undercut him with their own article.
Dr. Christopher Keim: But he would go to the dining car, he’d wait until everybody else had been served, and he and his body guard would go to the dining car, eat alone, he was always wearing dark glasses. Well, my goodness, if he were trying to hide from anybody, he wouldn’t do it that way. He’d merge right into the crowd along with his body guard. But that was one trip I well remember. Of course, I remember when we got to San Francisco, we saw guards with –
[end of recording]

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ORAL HISTORY OF CHRISTOPHER KEIM
Interviewed by Jim Overholt
July 27, 1990
[Side A]
Interviewer: – 7th, 1990, and I will be talking with Chris Keim about early Oak Ridge.
[break in recording]
Dr. Christopher Keim: – before that phenomenon of the Uranium atom splitting, and he said, “Well, in the biological sciences, we have term ‘fission,’ which we use.” And he said, “I think ‘fission’ would be an ideal term,” and that’s what they used.
Interviewer: So this was Bill Arnold who gave – was he British?
Dr. Christopher Keim: Then he came to Oak Ridge during the war years, 1944, ’45, and he worked here and I think he stayed here. I’ve lost track of him because the other day I was thinking of him and I was getting him and his wife confused with another Arnold, Elizabeth Arnold and St. George Tucker Arnold. St. George Tucker Arnold has since died and his wife is still living here. The Bill Arnolds, I’ve lost track of them. I intended to try to trace them down. A city directory might tell us.
Interviewer: Yeah, that would be a good source for me, too.
Dr. Christopher Keim: There is in the Oak Ridge telephone directory, I think, a William A. Arnold, and I didn’t know whether it would be quite the thing to do to call –
Interviewer: And say, “Are you the same?”
Dr. Christopher Keim: “Are you the Bill Arnold that I’ve lost track of?” because as we all get up in advanced years, one by one, they die.
Interviewer: That’s right.
Dr. Christopher Keim: That’s right. Could be embarrassed.
Interviewer: Well, I wouldn’t mind doing it. I might do it myself. Let me see –
[break in recording]
Interviewer: – that one thing that I’m interested in right now and, let’s see, let me date your arrival here. You came here in what, exactly what date?
Dr. Christopher Keim: I came on an interview December 26, 1943. Then I came back and entered the employment of Tennessee Eastman Corporation about February 5, 1944, somewhere around there.
Interviewer: Okay. Then you came at a very crucial moment, according to my notes, because this was right at the moment when they finally started trying to get these calutrons to work, and they didn’t work. Everything was breaking down on them. Can you tell me a little bit about – I want to know the atmosphere of that moment. Really, that went from November all the way down into the summer when it was a pretty bad time for Y-12 people.
Dr. Christopher Keim: Yes, although they did get the production, first production building in operation in about January of 1944, but they did have a real critical time prior to that because the magnetic fields, which were so important or vital, were breaking down. Magnetic fields were created by windings of silver.
Interviewer: Coils of silver.
Dr. Christopher Keim: Big coils, about ten feet in diameter, although it was in a rectangle. Those magnetic fields were breaking down, and there were several reasons. Because of the heavy currents, which were being passed though those silver windings, a lot of heat was generated, so the coils were cooled by oil. Oil was being circulated through and taken out of the cooling towers and cooled and back in again. Well, there were several reasons the current began to break down. One, there was water in the oil, and that’s a conductor of electricity, and that would short across the windings. There were lots of impurities in the piping systems. Those impurities were there because of construction. The workmen didn’t know or didn’t appreciate how clean things had to be, and maybe the inspectors weren’t completely sure of their inspection. And then there was another reason: the first windings, between two windings, there would be an insulator of Masonite. Masonite absorbed the moisture. As it absorbed the moisture, the electrical current went through the Masonite, shorted out. That increased and increased until those Masonite separators became carbon, and carbon was a good conductor of electricity. I was in the pilot plant for most of the time, and our coils in the pilot plant gradually began to short out because of those Masonite windings becoming carbonized due to the moisture and the current flowing through. As time went on, and it didn’t take long, of course, we installed in the circulating system of the oil a certain bit of equipment that would remove the moisture, and, of course, we filtered out all the impurities. But even then, we did have to take a lot of coils – they had to go back to Allis-Chalmers in Milwaukee and be rewound.
Interviewer: They were too tight, weren’t they. These coils were.
Dr. Christopher Keim: Well, and largely because of this Masonite and the shorting out.
Interviewer: So it wasn’t so much the tightness, it’s the –
Dr. Christopher Keim: It was not so much the tightness. Now there may have been more in the design that was faulty, I’m not sure. So, the first production buildings just collapsed completely because the magnetic fields could not be sustained. So it took a major overhaul.
Interviewer: Okay, so this was going on when you came here on the site. Can you remember when this began to be straightened out? How long did that take?
Dr. Christopher Keim: No, I really couldn’t because the electromagnetic enrichment was in two stages: the Alpha stage, which took the Uranium-235 from .7% up to about 25%; then the Beta stage, which took it from 25% up to 95%. The Alpha Building, of course, was the first one started, and that was operating in February when I came. But my work in the Pilot Plant, along with many others, was principally to try to improve the equipment. The equipment that went into the first building had a certain design. Hopefully it was improved so that as the second building went into operation, better equipment with more productivity was obtained. I remember when the Beta Building, first Beta Building went into production. This was sometime in the summer of 1944, maybe the spring. We closed down the Pilot Plant, and we all went to the Beta Building to help get it started. We quickly decided we needed to do some experimentation, which you can’t do on a production line, you shouldn’t do. So we went back and opened up the Pilot Plant again. So from 1944, February of 1944 to the time I left Y-12 in June of ’57, except for about two weeks, all my time was in the Pilot Plant in Process Improvement, although after the Uranium needs were passed and, of course, K-25, the gaseous diffusion process by the summer of 1945 was able to replace the electromagnetic process completely. Then in the Pilot Plant, we, on our own initiative, experimented with separating isotopes of other elements besides Uranium, and that started a twelve year program that I stayed with until we had gone through all the elements which have naturally occurring isotopes, and we had enriched them. You can imagine what a thrill that was to all of us, because it was the first time it had ever been done. Isotopes were known; they had been identified in mass spectrographs, but they were too small to collect measurable quantities. Now, the calutrons were really enlargements of those laboratory mass spectrograms.
Interviewer: Have you heard the story about Groves going before the Tennessee Eastman board of directors and trying to convince them to please take this job and help us to separate the ‘isotropes’? He kept mispronouncing it and he got out of the room, he was so determined to get this company to come in and do this, and that turned out to be quite an undertaking, which is not written about very much, you know, the people like DuPont, to get them to –
Dr. Christopher Keim: Yes, Tennessee Eastman wanted out as soon as the war was over.
Interviewer: Yeah, right.
Dr. Christopher Keim: And they did.
Interviewer: But he left the boardroom that day, and he turned to J. S. Marshall, and he said, “Well, how did I do?” He says, “How could you keep mispronouncing that word over and over again.” He said there was some member of that board who had a Ph.D. in Physics, I think he said, and he said, “I saw him shudder every time you mispronounced the word.”
Dr. Christopher Keim: Oh, he would, he would, and you’d feel sorry for him, the General, because he was trying to convince them to do the job then, but he didn’t quite know what he was doing.
Interviewer: Exactly. He didn’t know what he was saying. Let’s go back to that period again. Now, you’ve described very well the technical problems they had. What about the human atmosphere? Can you remember what people – was this the most tense period you remember?
Dr. Christopher Keim: Oh, my, yes, because – now, there were different kinds of people. There were people who didn’t know what was going on, and many of them were just waiting to be put to work, because they were in training sessions, but they had to have them all ready to go when the production buildings were ready to go. Those people were probably thankful to have a nice paying job and they probably were not particularly on edge. The technical people, people who knew what we were trying to do at that time, it was a very tense period. I had concluded the first day of my interview what they were doing here. They told me enough to let me draw my own conclusions, but I decided in my own mind what they were doing. But, of course, none of us knew, first of all, if atomic energy could ever be used as a bomb, although we did know, both because of the nuclear reactor at Stagg Field in Chicago, which went critical in –
Interviewer: I think it was November or December of ’42.
Dr. Christopher Keim: ’42, and then the Graphite Reactor went critical in November of ’43, so we knew a self-sustained reaction could be sustained. Now, could that be made into an explosive device? Nobody knew for sure, but we thought it could be. We also thought that, and had good reason at the time to believe that the Germans were working on something like this. Later, after the war, when I visited Germany, particularly Professor Mattaugh at, can’t think right now, the university where he is, he was doing the same kind of work over there with mass spectrographs that we were doing here, and I asked him if they were working on separating enough Uranium-235 to make a bomb, and he said, “No.” He said, “Some of us had convinced the military that we should separate the isotope from Iron, and make a lightweight battleship using a light isotope of Iron,” which was all fiction, of course. But he said – so they let Professor Mattaugh and his people continue working on the separation of isotopes like Iron, which was just fine with them, because that was the research in which they were engaged. And then, of course, you’ve heard of the Alsos Commission, haven’t you?
Interviewer: No, I haven’t.
Dr. Christopher Keim: The Alsos Commission, and I’m not sure it’s an acronym for something [Editor’s note: Alsos is not an acronym], when the Allied armies moved forward into Germany, this civilian team of high level scientists and engineers went with them.
Interviewer: Oh, I’m sorry, I do know about this.
Dr. Christopher Keim: And immediately would go into the universities under military protection, they would capture the professors, and they would take over the laboratories.
Interviewer: Right. They were going to poison them. There was a plan, they had even discussed trying to poison them, bizarre schemes.
Dr. Christopher Keim: Jimmy Lane, who lived in Oak Ridge for some time, has since died unfortunately, Jimmy was a member of that team.
Interviewer: Is that right?
Dr. Christopher Keim: And he didn’t say much about it, but informally, we used to visit with him a little about it.
Interviewer: There’s also a story, too, that on D-Day, people went in there with Geiger counters to see if they could detect any radiation, and they did fly reconnaissance planes to see if they could detect radiation in the air over Germany to see if there was a reactor or something.
Dr. Christopher Keim: That would be good. One morning in November, no wait, in 1945, it was in the spring of the year, I was shift supervisor in the Pilot Plant, and I received a telephone call. I may have told you this, that ‘Professor Baker’ would be visiting us?
Interviewer: Yeah, I think you mentioned that, but go ahead and tell the story.
Dr. Christopher Keim: I said, “Who’s Professor Baker?” And the person called me, said, “I can’t tell you that, but you may recognize him.” I said, “Okay.” Well, sure enough, when General Groves, E. O. Lawrence, and the party walked through the door, it was Niels, Professor Niels Bohr, just like he was walking right out of a textbook, where I’d seen him over and over again. And he was most friendly. He was just delightful, visited with us and asked about our work, and one thing or another. Then, in 1955, ten years later, I had the opportunity to visit with Professor Niels Bohr in his laboratory in Copenhagen, and I reminded him of his visit with us in Oak Ridge, and sure, he remembered it. So we visited about that. Then I asked him a very personal question. I told him I had heard that when the English two-seater fighter plane snatched him away from Denmark before the Germans could get him, that they put him in the back seat of that fighter plane, gave him an oxygen helmet, and he didn’t try it on, and the fighter plane in going back to England had to go so high to get away from the flack, they were trying to shoot them down, and the pilot told Professor Bohr to put on his oxygen helmet, and it was too small, because Professor Bohr had a larger head than they had expected. He couldn’t put that oxygen helmet on, and when they landed in England, he was unconscious.
Interviewer: So they had to revive him.
Dr. Christopher Keim: They had to revive him, and fortunately they did.
Interviewer: I’ll be darned. Do you remember what year that was when this was done? I guess that must have been ’41 or so before we were in the –
Dr. Christopher Keim: Well, that was before we were probably into it. Yes, it was ’41 or ’42, along there. I’d have to go back and try to find that in our information.
Interviewer: Where did he end up residing in America?
Dr. Christopher Keim: I do not know. Probably at Princeton. That’s where Wigner and Fermi, that was the gathering place. University of Chicago was also the gathering place. Those two places in particular, but I would guess at Princeton, but I don’t know for sure.
Interviewer: Okay, you mention Lawrence. How many times did you see Lawrence while you were here during the war?
Dr. Christopher Keim: Oh, my, we saw him at least once a month.
Interviewer: Was this a formal meeting, or did you see him coming through, passing through?
Dr. Christopher Keim: Let me tell you one particular example. He came into the pilot plant one night, and sat down at the controls and began operating the electrical controls and he said to us, “You ought to be getting more production than you’re getting. Let me see what I can do.” And he turned up the accelerating voltage, he turned up the temperature of the charge bottle where the Uranium Tetrachloride was being evaporated. Things began to spark inside the tank, the vacuum tank, but he got greater and greater and greater production. And he turned to us and he said, “See, this is the way you’ve got to do it.”
Unknown interrupter: Where’s your typewriter?
Interviewer: Right here.
Unknown interrupter: Is that the only one we have?
Interviewer: I don’t know if there’s another one around or not. You want me to take this out? I can take it in there and put it in there.
Unknown interrupter: Would you do that for me, please?
Interviewer: Yeah, okay.
[break in recording]
Interviewer: So –
Dr. Christopher Keim: As soon as he left the building, it wasn’t more than five minutes, less than that, the whole run terminated itself. It just literally exploded inside the tank, and of course that was what we were supposed to do, push and push and push until something failed and then open the tank and look in and take equipment out, find out what had failed, and improve it. Usually there were electrical insulators, because we were using more than twenty thousand Volts for accelerating the ions in there and they all had to be insulated from the metal tank itself. So we learned our lesson. Not only did we learn that he knew what he was doing, he could operate those tanks himself, but he gave us a new criterion to follow in our own development here.
Interviewer: Okay, tell me a little bit about his personality. How did he come over to people? I’ve always read that he was so enthusiastic and so confident in everything, that he just instilled this sort of confidence in everyone else.
Dr. Christopher Keim: Exactly. He was so enthusiastic and just moved at full speed all the time, communicated well, was very informal. He would hold seminars with us. Let me give you an example of one in particular. On July 17th, 1945, they exploded the first plutonium bomb at Alamogordo. The very next day, E. O. Lawrence was in our Pilot Plant, and that was kind of a center of process development. Some of the people there were some of his own people from University of California, some of them were Tennessee Eastman people like myself, and he called us all together. He didn’t tell us about what had happened the day before. He told us what he was going to be doing and what they were going to be doing at the University of California after the war. He knew the war was as good as over when he saw that bomb.
Interviewer: He was already talking in post-war terms by that time.
Dr. Christopher Keim: Because he knew if that bomb had to be used, it would end the war. And the confidence which he demonstrated was so contagious at that time.
Interviewer: Was he a big man? He looks like he was big in the photographs.
Dr. Christopher Keim: Yes, he was not unusually large, I don’t know, six feet or maybe a little more, but he carried a bit of weight, not overweight. It was just so natural with him. He was not thin, he was not overweight.
Interviewer: And he was what, fifty? Somewhere around late forties early fifties?
Dr. Christopher Keim: At that time he was probably, yes, late forties or about fifty. I’ve forgotten his age when he died. Do you know?
Interviewer: Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t even know when he died.
Dr. Christopher Keim: I have that in my chronology at home. I should have brought it along. But after the war, especially, I well remember we used to hear that he was ill with diverculo –
Interviewer: Diverculosis, yeah, no, diverticulosis. [Editor’s note: diverticulitis]
Dr. Christopher Keim: Something like that. I think that.
Interviewer: Yeah, my grandmother had that.
Dr. Christopher Keim: He never survived that, he just became worse and worse. Both he and Fermi died too soon. It’s unfortunate that they didn’t have at least twenty more years on their active work.
Interviewer: It’s amazing the youth of all of those, even those great upper echelon scientists, they were still quite young.
Dr. Christopher Keim: When I came, I was not yet thirty-eight. General Groves was only thirty-six.
Interviewer: No, forty-six.
Dr. Christopher Keim: Okay, all right, I’m wrong.
Interviewer: But that’s still young, though.
Dr. Christopher Keim: But Colonel Nichols was thirty-six. I was one of the older people out at Y-12 and certainly in the Pilot Plant.
Interviewer: I’ve heard Waldo Cohn say several times, he said, “I was thirty-three when I got here and I was an old man compared to the rest of them.
Dr. Christopher Keim: I see people retiring right now, I noticed the other day, George Banic is retiring. Now I expect George has worked up until seventy. I hired George in right after he graduated from Penn State. And he worked for me all that time, or all the time I was in Y-12. A great, great guy. George would be worth visiting with because he has such a rich background.
Interviewer: How do you spell his last name?
Dr. Christopher Keim: B-A-N-I-C. I believe it’s C. Now there are two George Banics in the telephone directory, and I think it’s B-A-N-I-C. They used to live in the Garden Apartments. I don’t know whether they still do or not.
Interviewer: Before I leave the subject of Lawrence, he practically lived here for about a year, I guess, didn’t he? He just stayed in Oak Ridge, or, do you know?
Dr. Christopher Keim: Well, he’d be traveling some. It didn’t seem to me that he was here all the time. He’d come and go, but I’m sure during those critical days of starting up the production buildings, he lived here. I don’t know for sure. You see, I wasn’t close to production. I was close to the process improvement, which was on the fringe.
Interviewer: Now, one other thing that I really want to try to pinpoint, if I can, when you were working in there, did you pretty much know every part of the process of the electromagnetic? I mean, you knew the names of these things, not the code names, but the real names and the people you worked with.
Dr. Christopher Keim: Yes, you’ve known of the different Roman numerals on the badges. Top management – and all I know is Y-12. I knew there was something going on over the hill at the X-10 area, something down at the K-25 area, but I never visited there. I was pretty well sequestered in the Y-12 area. But I knew our very top managers had Roman numeral V on their badges, and people like me, next level, had IV. We were told, “We will tell you what you need to know. You don’t need to ask any questions. In fact, we encourage you not to ask questions.” But as it was, we knew at my level the process in all its detail. We didn’t know the production quantities, the production figures. Those working in chemistry would know all the chemistry details, but I didn’t have to know the chemistry details, because I was interested in the mechanical and electrical, the physics details of the source, the ion source, and the collector. And we had a lot of problems with both. We tried to increase the production, the number of ions, atoms, coming out of the source, and we’d try to improve the retention up there in the collector, because we knew as they came in there, a lot of them would hit and bounce right out again. We had to trap them in there.
Interviewer: It had something to do with the texture at first. It was just going into the – I forget what metal it was, but it was just staying in there; they couldn’t get it out.
Dr. Christopher Keim: We used principally both copper and graphite, but I think mostly we used graphite, because graphite could operate at an extremely high temperature.
[telephone rings]
[break in recording]
Dr. Christopher Keim: But one night we were working on the receiver, the collector, and we had a graphite grid placed in front of the collector pockets, trying to slow down those Uranium-235 atoms as they would go in, try to slow them down, so when they hit on the inside, into the pockets, they wouldn’t bounce back. We had some success with that. However, the energy of those ions hitting that grid would cause it to run red hot, and we hadn’t been able to extend its life. We wanted the time of life for a normal production run to be, oh, four or five days if possible, and anything less than seventy-two hours or ninety-six hours we tried to improve. We were working on that equipment one night and getting some results on it. General Groves came in and he said, “How’s your new collector working?” I was shift supervisor and I said, “Well, it works fine for about twenty-four hours, but we haven’t been able to extend its life greater than that. And we have hopes; we’re going to keep working on it.” He said, “I’d like to see your log book.” He sat down and he looked at the log book. He visited with different people. Then he asked us a key question; that’s really why he was there that night. He said, “Tomorrow morning at eight o’clock, we have to determine what equipment would go into our next Beta building. Is this collector ready?”
We said, “No, it’s not.” He said, “If you had to make the decision tomorrow morning, what would your decision [be]?” Well, I’m very conservative myself, and I said, “I’d stick with that that we know will work and try to improve the productivity of what already is working.” The next morning, I got a telephone call from somebody in Tennessee Eastman production, and they said, “General Groves reviewed his visit with you fellows last night. He’s told us that in the next Beta building to use the same equipment that we’d been using.” But how he knew so much, how he could get to the detail of so much of what was going on is –
Interviewer: Yeah, he was really quite remarkable.
Dr. Christopher Keim: He was.
Interviewer: I mean, he was everywhere, you know, he sure was an abrupt individual, made a lot of people angry, but what you really wanted in this was speed, and if there was anybody that could do that it was Groves.
Dr. Christopher Keim: He was positive and he was precise. When he would come in to visit with us, he always had an aide with him, of course. His aide would be looking at his watch, and when the time came, he’d touch the general on the arm, “Have to go.” And I admired that in him because he was on a minute by minute schedule.
Interviewer: He was so busy, I read the other night, he was so busy that he had a secretary, Jean O’Leary, I believe was her name, that when he left Washington, I bet you’ve heard this story, that he would take her with him. He wanted to dictate notes to her, but he didn’t have time to stay in Washington and do it, so he’d take her with him, dictate notes on the train, and they would get to a certain point, she would get off the train and get on another one and go back to Washington.
Dr. Christopher Keim: I’m not surprised, and I can imagine that he’d probably go to Chicago and then go back. A couple of our trips to California –
Interviewer: Yeah, I wanted to ask you that. Tell me a little about those trips.
Dr. Christopher Keim: Probably the first trip I took was plane, a DC-3, unpressurized, and we landed at Memphis, we landed at Little Rock, we landed at Dallas, we landed at Albuquerque, and every time we came down, I would feel in my ears that they were hemorrhaging. I was scared, and it took me two or three days after I got to Berkeley to recover from that, but when I got on that plane, I did not know I had a cold. But that change in altitude caught me in a hurry. After that, many of us preferred to take the Streamliners. We’d get on a train, either at Knoxville, or, if we called Knoxville in the morning and said, the afternoon train, whatever number, we want to get on at Edgemoor Road, they would stop. And we’d jump on the first place we could get on, and we might have to carry our baggage all the way through the train to get to our Pullman seats, but they would stop for us. We would then take the Streamliner, either the Zephyr from Burlington or the Union Pacific out of Chicago, and generally we’d be put in the last compartment on the train. And I thought that was strange, except the service we got convinced me that that compartment probably was reserved for the Manhattan Project.
Interviewer: For purposes of maintaining –
Dr. Christopher Keim: Continually.
Interviewer: Yeah, and maybe that was also purposes of security.
Dr. Christopher Keim: And for purpose of security, and the first thing the Pullman conductor asked me when he put us into that room, “Do you want your meals brought to you? Or do you want to go to the dining room, the dining car?” And one trip we had our meals brought to us; we did not want to go to the dining car. The last trip I think I took at that time was probably sometime in ’45, because the United Nations’ first organization meeting was being held in San Francisco, and we were in that compartment at the rear. But I enjoyed going up to the club car, because it was filled with well-known radio commentators and columnists.
Interviewer: Can you remember some of their names now?
Dr. Christopher Keim: Walter Winchell.
Interviewer: Is that right?
Dr. Christopher Keim: And the newspaper journalists didn’t care for Walter Winchell. They planted a rumor and saw that he got it, because they knew he’d get to San Francisco about three or four o’clock, Sunday afternoon. He would go right on the air at six o’clock with his Sunday evening broadcast and he would just delight in scoop. Well they gave him a false scoop. And he went on out on the air that night and told that as if it were the gospel truth, and they, in their columns the very next day, were able to tell what the truth was and really, they didn’t tell that they had planted this, but it was obvious.
Interviewer: So just undercut him with their own article.
Dr. Christopher Keim: But he would go to the dining car, he’d wait until everybody else had been served, and he and his body guard would go to the dining car, eat alone, he was always wearing dark glasses. Well, my goodness, if he were trying to hide from anybody, he wouldn’t do it that way. He’d merge right into the crowd along with his body guard. But that was one trip I well remember. Of course, I remember when we got to San Francisco, we saw guards with –
[end of recording]